Walk, Clap & Boogie (Milestones pt. XII)

Seven days ago, Justin turned 10 months old (okay, so I'm late... sue me). His summary in 5 minutes or less? He is still trying to walk, eating more and more table food (despite still having no teeth), infatuated with opening and closing doors, and already getting into plenty of trouble around the house. V just read something the other day about how kids this age understand way more than we often realize... and you can see it in his eyes. He knows when he's up to something. And better yet, he knows when you know that he's up to something. At only 10 months I can already see that the years that I gave my parents grief while growing up will all soon be coming back to bite me in the bottom. And this was evident even before Justin started showing flashes of a temper just 4 or 5 days ago.

Good grief. Fasten your seat belts. 



As for milestones, the most amazing thing he did recently was climb the entire flight of stairs in our house without any help. What baffled me was that we had never allowed him to explore this area of the house, especially since our stairs aren't carpeted. So here I am, thinking I'm doing something cool... exposing him to something new... wondering if he'd understand where the stairs go and how they work... and before I could even devise a plan as to how to conduct this experiment, Justin was already 4 steps up and plowing forward like he'd been doing this all his life. Okay, you probably had to be there, but trust me, it was crazy. Just one step after another. And he was so matter-of-fact about the entire ordeal. And when he got to the top, he turned and looked at me totally straight-faced like, "what's the big deal? they're just steps, man." All I could do was laugh.

I guess I should not have been surprised since he has always been especially observant (everyone labels him a "watcher"). But now his ability to observe and correlate is starting to become more apparent. For months, he has been grabbing the remote and pointing it to the television, so he gets that. But the funniest thing yesterday was when I gave him my set of house and car keys, thinking something new would keep him busy for a minute. But rather than just play with the keys, he grabbed them and took off running for the front door to put the two together. I'm not sure if the correlation was keys-and-door or keys-and-leave... but either way, that's not what threw me for the biggest loop. Instead, it was the fact that in a full stretch the rugrat was actually able to reach the doorknob. OMG! When did our son grow tall enough to make contact with a doorknob? Kind of scary, to be honest. But I'm already seeing how fast this entire growing up process can unfold and fly right by you if you're not careful.

Anyhow, in other correlation news, he also cracked us both up when he grabbed a comb off the floor 2 days ago and started running it through his hair. Not sure who he's been watching to learn that one, but my guess is that it wasn't me. As for talking, "mama" and "dada" are still the words of the day... but we're working on a few more (like "nite nite"), and with a little bit of coaching, his "dada" is slowly converging to "da-DEE"... but we're not quite there yet. And I'm sure there are like 14 million other things that I need to update concerning his evolution... but at 11:21pm after a very long week, I can't think of anything else worth blogging about. So without further ado, here's a 90 second clip of Justin doing his thing. Enjoy and G'nite!